Beautiful, blue eyed blond hair five yr old killed senselessly...

Fred,

Ronald Reagan signed "No Fault Divorce" into universal federal law across all 50 states, then lived to regret it:

I have no idea, however, how courts react to those circumstances; do they accurately address that, are they encumbered by judges personal bias in the proceedings?

No. Unless mom or dad is a certifiable ax murderer, they don't give a damn.

Do they just coldly process the ...mess... as best they can?

Yes. Sub zero degrees. The "loser" is forced to "suck it up" (i.e. responsibilities defined and engineered by strangers, that is if the five to ten minutes of "mediation" produce nothing satisfying to the "winner.")
Then losers are expected to "get over it" (the loss if irreplaceable value, that is, because nihilism doesn't accept the idea of "value" = "life.")

Post 41

Monday, December 31, 2012 - 1:38pm

My experience of Family Court is from a very different perspective. For a five year period I was working child abuse cases for the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. I would be called on to provide reports that substantiated or cleared a parent or parents of child abuse allegations and to provide recommendations for the court.

That department never made allegations of emotional abuse despite it being real, and damaging, and covered by statute, because the system was already overwhelmed with cases of severe neglect (kids starving and toddlers without supervision for days, if at all), physical abuse (up to and including murder), and sexual abuse. We weren't involved in disputes between parents regarding the level of support and we weren't there for one parent or the other. It was always from the perspective of what was best for the child and only when the child's rights were violated.

We knew that there is an indelible bond formed by biology, or that should form, and that we were loath to break (and because we also knew that much of the foster care system was highly dysfunctional). So we wanted to find ways to 'fix' dysfunctional families so the child wouldn't be shipped off.

I could go on and on about the people who didn't do their jobs or did them badly, but it was very rare that I didn't see the judges rule as wisely as they could. I didn't, and don't, like the autonomy the current system gives these judges. Laws based more tightly on Individual rights and a more balanced, adversarial system is needed, but those judges I encountered worked hard to get to the truth and to make rulings they hoped would be in the best interests of the children - I didn't disagree very often with the rulings. The family court I saw was trying to counter a tidal wave of bad parents, most of whom were drug-sodden devotees of an angry, entitlement society that had far less personal responsibility on display than your average elementary school child. (Los Angeles County was carrying over 70,000 cases per year at that time.)

My experience of the parents, people who would allow, or cause such harm to their children was of a group of sick individuals (their sickness not being a moral excuse!). I would have been much harsher towards them for violating the rights of their children if had been up to me. But family court was attending to the care of the child and not the punishment of the parent - that was done, if at all, in criminal court.

There were a great many of us working in this arena who had a strong emotional leaning towards people not being allowed to have children till they could prove they were mature and rational enough to do it reasonably well ('emotional leaning,' not intellectual agreement).

Anyway, the decision to take temporary custody, or to sever parental rights permanently, or to lock up a parent, or to order specific performances like drug testing, was based upon a violation of the child's right to be free of violence, sexual abuse, and to be given a bare minimum of supervision, food and medical attention. And that makes my experiences those of a very different place from the one that Teresa and Deanna are addressing - divorce and attendant parental custody arrangements where the child isn't being subjected to severe abuse.

Post 42

Tuesday, January 1, 2013 - 11:30am

I've been trying to think of what the guiding principles ought to be for deciding child custody types of issues. As long as two humans join one another under the belief that their union will last, we will have child custody issues.

Look at the alternatives. Are people in the future going to somehow become prescient and can see into the future of their relationships with such accuracy that they can tell, decades in advance, which relationships will endure and which won't? Not going to happen.

Are people going to evolve psychologically to the point where once in a relationship, they can be so accepting and capable of making adjustments, and so in control of their consciousness that no relationship will ever fail? Not going to happen any time soon, that's for sure.

Is society going to decide that once you have children it doesn't matter if you grow totally apart and even hate each other, you WILL stay together... or else? I see that as a greater evil than divorce - a state-enforced permanent marriage that sacrifices the freedom and happiness of the parents. People change over time, and if you really believe in happiness, you also have to believe in divorce.

(What one should shoot for is the kind of maturity and character that permits a deeply friendly and loving divorce (friends without benefits?) - I believe that is possible, but not at the level of psychological maturity that most of us are currently capable of at our current, average stage of human development.)

Another alternative is to view divorce as immoral when you have children, but like drug abuse, even though it is evil, it shouldn't be illegal. I wouldn't agree with that statement. I believe that what is immoral about divorce is the way it is often done in our society - legally, psychologically and culturally. I'd say it is like the difference between having a glass of wine with dinner and being a drunk. There are immoral divorces (because of the way they occur in relation to the children) and there are divorces that aren't. But this doesn't matter, because if you believe that people have the individual right to get a divorce, that freedom of association applies to this most important association, then we arrive at the need for a family court.

Part of the legal/political environment that protects our rights includes the civil courts to resolve disagreements without violence. Two mature, reasonable, good people can find themselves unable to agree on something that is so important that they also can't let go of it. The lessor evil in this circumstance is an impartial judgment that the two parties must accept and hopefully it is based upon good principles relevant to the context of the disagreement.

That is as far as I have gone in my thinking and clearly the existing laws and the practices driving family court as it exists today might be awful... It is, after all, quite rare that we find government doing anything right, and more often it acts to trash its own stated goals and our rights.

I'm just saying that some kind of family court would be needed to resolve civil disputes.

To me, the issue is what could we do with our civil statutes related to marriage (a form of a contract), decision-making rights regarding any children, and the divorce itself, where the goals would be fewer contentious disputes in the future, ensuring more justice when a difference is resolved via the courts, and always respecting the freedom of association?

Post 43

Tuesday, January 1, 2013 - 12:35pm

I think mature, reasonable, rational, value driven people will see there is never any need to use government to issue force against one another. There are already couples who make their own arrangements outside of government protected force.

Psychology could do a whole lot of work in this area to help cut off government's ability to manipulate otherwise good and decent people by working with couples having problems, if only to help them see how destructive manipulation by the court actually is. But as it stands, most family therapists are in the same mindset as the statist, bureaucratic, manipulative, destructive government system. All they do is try to help people deal with the inevitable destruction coming their way, instead of looking for alternatives to that destruction.

When people realize that government can never provide any answers to their personal relationship problems, but instead only works to compound and multiply those problems, then we'll see less conflict involving child rearing issues.

Rolling back no-fault divorce would be a very good start, in my opinion, but the ultimate end should be illiminating the artificial winners vs. losers game in any system that shamelessly uses helpless children as trophies. Its a disgustingly huge fraud.

Post 44

Tuesday, January 1, 2013 - 5:56pm

Teresa,

I'd agree that mature, reasonable, rational, value driven people are far less likely to find themselves locked into a disagreement over their children - but that isn't saying it won't happen. We'd have to be robots and perfectly informed and identical in our values and perspectives to say otherwise.

So, if they have access to top-notch psychological help that would be good, but it is very hard to find and even with it, there can still be disagreements that won't be resolved.

If they are mature, reasonable, rational, value driven people they are more likely to understand how dangerous getting entangled with government can be, but that still isn't enough to resolve all agreements.

If we had better laws on the books, and better education on this issue people would plan better - they would make explicit, detailed written contracts before having kids to try to cover the imaginable contingencies - but, again, it isn't going to answer all circumstances that can arise.

I've known people to enter into business partnerships with nothing but a handshake... and later leave it with lots of bad feelings and serious losses because they didn't envision the possibility of unresolveable, major disagreements and the need for a good way to move forward under those conditions. And children are much more complex an area, and an area more easily fraught with emotion.

What do you do with the people who are not mature, reasonable, rational, value driven people? What do you do with those who are, but find that no matter what they try they are still in strong disagreement over a child custody issue? If they have put in place a binding, private arbitration agreement then they have a source for a forced, third party resolution and that would probably be better than dragging government in. But a government court might still have to enforce that contract provision and would have to be there to provide a resolution if they cannot find any other way to agree and they both refuse to let go of the issue.

Being rational animals doesn't mean always being rational. It just means that we have that as a capacity - we aren't perfect in its use. I've seen lots of good people totally unable to agree on something. If they are lucky it is something where they can simply agree to disagree. Or, if it is very important to one, and not so much to the other, it becomes a matter of acceptance for the one who isn't as strong invested in the issue. But when the future of child is seen as on the block, and the couple no longer is invested in a relationship - no longer living together - it can be harder to find common ground or accept losing a given argument.

Post 45

Wednesday, January 2, 2013 - 3:43am

I just don't think its true that couples would have to be robots or have perfect knowledge to deal with a breakup involving children. I think people are a whole lot smarter and benevolent than the system gives them credit for, or even allows them to be.

For cases involving one partner with psychopathic/sadistic tendencies, rolling back no-fault divorce would and should take care of and limit the damage those people are interested in causing their ex and, by extension, their children.

Post 46

Wednesday, January 2, 2013 - 6:33am

Teresa,

If you have any couple with children that are breaking up, married or living together, and they don't agree on custody issues, they should have access to a civil court to dispute their disagreement over rights.

You could eliminate anything called "family court" and you could throw out all statutes related to marriage, family law, or child custody and it wouldn't change the fact that people who disagree have a civil right to contest custody disagreements.

It would not make sense to take away access to civil court for them any more than it would for business partners, or for two parties to a contract, or any two people who have a material disagreement.

It's a two-edged sword. We must grant access to a civil court if we want to protect rights, but we have to create laws regarding its exercise that are just or its exercise of power will be abused (as it is today in some tort proceedings, and in some family court cases).

Post 47

Wednesday, January 2, 2013 - 6:45am